Related papers: Simplified Prophet Inequalities for Combinatorial …
We study the equilibria of uniform price auctions where many asymmetric bidders have flat demands up to their respective quantity constraints. We present an iterative procedure that systematically finds an equilibrium outcome as well as an…
Prophet inequalities bound the expected reward that can be obtained in a stopping problem by the optimal reward of its corresponding off-line version. We propose a systematic technique for deriving prophet inequalities for stopping problems…
Two general algorithms based on opportunity costs are given for approximating a revenue-maximizing set of bids an auctioneer should accept, in a combinatorial auction in which each bidder offers a price for some subset of the available…
We study revenue maximization in multi-item auctions, where bidders have subadditive valuations over independent items. Providing a simple mechanism that is approximately revenue-optimal in this setting is a major open problem in mechanism…
The study of the prophet inequality problem in the limited information regime was initiated by Azar et al. [SODA'14] in the pursuit of prior-independent posted-price mechanisms. As they show, $O(1)$-competitive policies are achievable using…
We show that every universally truthful randomized mechanism for combinatorial auctions with submodular valuations that provides $m^{\frac 1 2 -\epsilon}$ approximation to the social welfare and uses value queries only must use…
We present a quantum auction protocol using superpositions to represent bids and distributed search to identify the winner(s). Measuring the final quantum state gives the auction outcome while simultaneously destroying the superposition.…
We show that in the single-parameter mechanism design environment, the only non-wasteful, symmetric, incentive compatible and Sybil-proof direct mechanism is a second price auction with symmetric tie-breaking. Thus, if there is private…
Prophet inequalities compare online stopping strategies against an omniscient "prophet" using distributional knowledge. In this work, we augment this model with a conservative prediction of the maximum realized value. We quantify the…
Prophet inequalities for rewards maximization are fundamental to optimal stopping theory with extensive applications to mechanism design and online optimization. We study the \emph{cost minimization} counterpart of the classical prophet…
We provide a Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) for the Bayesian optimal multi-item multi-bidder auction problem under two conditions. First, bidders are independent, have additive valuations and are from the same population.…
The existence of incentive-compatible computationally-efficient protocols for combinatorial auctions with decent approximation ratios is the paradigmatic problem in computational mechanism design. It is believed that in many cases good…
The goal of an auction is to determine commodity prices such that all participants are perfectly happy. Such a solution is called a competitive equilibrium and does not exist in general. For this reason we are interested in solutions which…
Consider a seller with m heterogeneous items for sale to a single additive buyer whose values for the items are arbitrarily correlated. It was previously shown that, in such settings, distributions exist for which the seller's optimal…
This paper studies an environment of simultaneous, separate, first-price auctions for complementary goods. Agents observe private values of each good before making bids, and the complementarity between goods is explicitly incorporated in…
This paper investigates reverse auctions that involve continuous values of different types of goods, general nonconvex constraints, and second stage costs. We seek to design the payment rules and conditions under which coalitions of…
Combinatorial auctions are formulated as frustrated lattice gases on sparse random graphs, allowing the determination of the optimal revenue by methods of statistical physics. Transitions between computationally easy and hard regimes are…
We consider budget constrained combinatorial auctions where bidder $i$ has a private value $v_i$, a budget $b_i$, and is interested in all the items in $S_i$. The value to agent $i$ of a set of items $R$ is $|R \cap S_i| \cdot v_i$. Such…
We consider the problem of designing truthful auctions, when the bidders' valuations have a public and a private component. In particular, we consider combinatorial auctions where the valuation of an agent $i$ for a set $S$ of items can be…
We construct prior-free auctions with constant-factor approximation guarantees with ordered bidders, in both unlimited and limited supply settings. We compare the expected revenue of our auctions on a bid vector to the monotone price…